In this intriguing book, Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. In Minna's case, white people fought over who would pay for the costs of caring for a dependent, apparently enslaved, woman. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debate - about care as a "mere voluntary courtesy" - became routine in a wide range of subsequent cases about "good Samaritans". Using Minna's case as a springboard, Hartog explores the statutes, situations, and conflicts that helped produce a regime where slavery was usually but not always legal and where a supposedly enslaved person may or may not have been legally free.
In exploring this liminal and unsettled legal space, Hartog sheds light on the relationships between moral and legal reasoning and a legal landscape that challenges simplistic notions of what it meant to live in freedom. What emerges is a provocative portrait of a distant legal order that, in its contradictions and moral dilemmas, bears an ironic resemblance to our own legal world.
Hendrik Hartog is Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus at Princeton University and author of Public Property and Private Power.
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“Favors . . . details the integral role of black colleges in nurturing 'communitas' and the 'unwritten second curriculum' . . . which spearheaded activism among African Americans from the nadir of race relations (after Reconstruction) to the present day . . . Favors describes the second curriculum and communitas not as a subversive plot against American democracy, but instead as a beacon of hope for all people. Given recent spates of racial unrest across the nation and on college campuses, this book delivers a counter-narrative that is at once historic and prescient.”- CHOICE
“A welcome addition to the history of higher education and the contemporary scholarship on student activism, social movements, and leadership. . . . A powerful reminder that black colleges were not just a consequence of de jure segregation. They have been, and continue to be, a symbolic space that affirms the humanity and agency of black youth.”- Academe “Traces the shifting arguments made by the workers and the politicians who sought to transform an agency that was fiercely opposed to transformation.”- Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker
“It is this history of segregation, and of resistance to it, that Goldberg chronicles masterfully, from firehouse fistfights to fraternal organizations to federal litigation.”- Gotham Center for New York History
“Works hard to remind us, powerfully at times, about black firefighters' courage, persistent struggle against discrimination, and efforts to work the system for greater racial equity.”- Journal of American History
“A welcome contribution to literature on race and labor in American cities. . . . Goldberg reminds us how central public employment has been to the economic and political struggles of African Americans over the past century.”- Journal of African American History
“Provides a relentless display of facts, figures, and insights in narrating this black labor resistance to intransigent white supremacy. He does so with an able collection of archival evidence, oral histories, and a survey of secondary literature, all told as a gripping story that includes some memorable individuals and concludes with a qualified upbeat ending--at least for now.”- American Historical Review “Hartog resists the impulse prevalent in the historiography of northern emancipation to keep moral score; he neither celebrates nor castigates gradual abolitionism. Rather, Hartog follows the smoke of litigation to find fires that shed light on fraught human experiences. Subsequent historians of northern slavery's terminal era will learn from his thoughtful approach to a legal regime designed paradoxically to dismantle and to maintain the status quo.”- Journal of the Civil War Era
“Hartog's line-blurring has taken a novel tack by demonstrating how antebellum slavery in New Jersey was hardly the monolithic 'unfreedom' we have come to accept . . . . The Trouble with Minna makes a robust addition to a historiographical field which ultimately reveals the historical coexistence and codependence of capitalism and slavery.”- Law & Social Inquiry
“Contributes significantly to our understanding of how the law worked during the emancipation era.”- Journal of American History
